Can heritage fuel the reinvention of a brand?
Instead of limiting the future of a brand, heritage can be leveraged to support innovation and reinvention, says brand strategist Tim Riches in this guest post.
Many of the businesses we work with are attempting to reinvigorate long-established brands to become famous for selling new things.
Often this revolves around the question of heritage – the ‘story so far’ that has accumulated around the brand. Once an unambiguous brand asset, many companies have come to have a more ambivalent view for a couple of reasons.
One is the emergence of big brands with no history. Brands that come out of nowhere to grow and succeed quickly represent the core of the disruptive technology narrative.
The obvious examples are Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Google and Facebook. If these businesses can do what they have done, you might think a brand that has been around for decades can be rebooted too; that it just takes a new and better customer value proposition powered by a tech upgrade.
BigPond is a dead sub-brand now, partly because Telstra rejuvenated the core brand, but also because internet stopped being a peripheral offering and became the main attraction.